Filthy Beast

Ok, im fed up with Hughes Net's I was thinking about getting a 3G card, with

a cell phone booster for maxium service (yes they work with data cards), i have 2

ATT towers within 4 or 5 miles of my location. I dont know if there 3G towers, but

there aligned to the interstate. Any of you have experience with the 3G cards or

cell phone booster's ? You tech's help me out here. Its going to cost me $500 to

$600 to move my Hughes Net into our new house, i aint goin there. Not for their

service.

DrCloud

I got a broadband card to use when traveling. It's basically a cell phone for the computer. Carriers seem to sell packages based on download bytes per month, rather than minutes. Make sure you compare them carefully -- as I recall, I was offered 50MBytes/month for $39.95 and 5 GBytes/month for $59.95, or some such thing. Overages are very expensive.

It works fine when 3G service is available -- speeds are not as fast as a hard-wire connection, but quite reasonable for everything but big image downloads. On the other hand, when the network falls back to the previous generation digital signals (my ATT service in Colorado is via the "Edge" network, for example), it's about like a 56K modem -- tedious.

I find it most useful when traveling, as it allows you to avoid paying the daily rates for connectivity at airports and other such places.

Also, note that it's portable among computers -- you can use it in your desktop at home and in your laptop on the road, or whatever. HPH

fltsfshr

i have one as well. It's a bit slow and spotty unless you're in the right place. Ive gotten online 5 miles off shore but no connection in the middle of the glades today.


fltsfshr

boltonblue

I had a verizon card last year for work. I used to get 155 kbs usually and sometimes 400 kbs... just like a fast dialup connection.
I have cable at home. I can get 12 mbs down and 540 kbits up.

I'll keep my cable unless FIOS shows up.

Filthy Beast

Thanks guys, i will look into this further. Looks like this is my only option
at this point. Unless by some chance of a miracle we get cable out here.

martha

Great timing on this thread as I have what is probably a stupid question. My company just provided a wireless card (via ATT) for internet redundancy and traveling. The base plan is $50/month for 5 gigs of data. My problem is that I have no comprehension of what 5 gigs of data is. Can anyone put this into terms I can understand, i.e. how many minutes or hours on yahoo messenger (where most of my business is done), or how many e-mail sent/received or how many minutes/hours of my Reuters screen updating every nano-second? I hear the overages are rather costly so need to get a feel for what I'm doing if possible.

Thanks!

Scooterboy

^ I have the same questions plus what if I have an iPhone with the data plan. Do I have to subscribe to an additional service for my computer?

boltonblue

martha the biggest place to burn data is on photos and videos.

web pages with those cute little commercials etc can suck up the bandwidth too.
some, if not all of the cards give a you a utility to check your usage.
In one respect 5 gigs is a lot of text, you couldn't read that much in your life.
On the other hand, I just downloaded 2.6 gig for the windows 7 beta release.

DrCloud

Martha -- As long as you're doing normal* email and web surfing, I doubt that your 5 GByte limit will be a factor. (*"Normal" means that people are not sending you movies as attachments, and that their pictures are reasonably few and small.)

And you really don't want to be downloading new software packages, either, unless you know them to be small (the bandwidth will discourage this anyway, as it's relatively slow for huge files).

I've never run up against the limit, even with a lot of this "normal" use.

Just keep Dean away from it, so he doesn't blow the limit with those movies of questionable character that he downloads all the time. HPH

martha

Thanks, guys. I only get business e-mail on that machine so downloads won't be a problem. My concern was more the constantly updating Reuters screen and high volume yahoo messenger. Sounds like I should be ok though.

By the way, just installed it last night and that thing is FAST. We have Comcast cable that we use as our primary.